Fashion/social advertising. What happens when fashion advertising meets social issues

Fashion/social advertising (FSA) is a composite phenomenon, which involves different perspectives: on one hand, we can talk about FSA when fashion advertising addresses social issues; on the other hand, when social advertising is about fashion or goes against fashion. This paper aims to understand virtues and vices of the fashion/social advertising phenomenon through two different qualitative researches founded on media content analysis. The first one aims to analyse how fashion/social ads talk to the public. The second one focuses on the decisions of Italian Istituto dell’Autodisciplina Pubblicitaria about fashion/social ads, aiming to understand when and how fashion/social advertising doesn’t talk ethically. In respect of both the quoted perspectives, the research shows that FSA gives rise to an effective and efficient advertising model in terms of values, texts and practices (especially referring to the so-called “unconventional social advertising”). At the same time, the research highlights the shift between “thinking ethically” (on which FSA should be grounded) and “talking ethically”; this shift causes consistent problems concerning the management of ethical issues in Italian advertising.